A bad app, or bad actors, may be using your phone for nefarious purposes! Dunkey has a new Best of the Year video. Alan has a movie recommendation we missed earlier. Josh answers last weeks Bad Description of a video game, and gives a new one.

Celeste – Help Madeline survive her inner demons on her journey to the top of Celeste Mountain, in this super-tight platformer from the creators of TowerFall. Brave hundreds of hand-crafted challenges, uncover devious secrets, and piece together the mystery of the mountain.

Into The Breach – Control powerful mechs from the future to defeat an alien threat. Each attempt to save the world presents a new randomly generated challenge in this turn-based strategy game. From the creators of FTL.

Zeroranger – Bullet hell shoot em up with beautiful pixel graphics down with minimal colour palette, and an amazing soundtrack.

Enter the Gungeon – A bullet hell dungeon crawler following a band of misfits seeking to shoot, loot, dodge roll and table-flip their way to personal absolution by reaching the legendary Gungeon’s ultimate treasure: the gun that can kill the past.

Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze – Help Donkey Kong and his friends get back their home from Vikings.

Super Smash Bros Ultimate

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End – Set 3 years after the events of Uncharted 3, Nathan Drake has apparently left the world of fortune hunting behind. However, it doesn’t take long for adventure to come calling when Drake’s brother, Sam, re-emerges asking for his help to save his own life and offering an adventure Drake cannot resist.

Lumines – The critically-acclaimed puzzle game produced by legendary creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi comes to PC.

Monster Hunter World – Enjoy the ultimate hunting experience, using everything at your disposal to hunt monsters in a new world teeming with surprises and excitement.

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon – Battle with swords and whips in this retro-style action game brought to you by game creator Koji Igarashi and Inti Creates! Play as Zangetsu, a demon slayer bearing a deep grudge, who must travel through perilous lands to defeat a powerful demon lurking in a dark castle.

Downwell – A game about a young man going down an endless well with gun-boots.

Jack Box Party Packs – The team behind YOU DON’T KNOW JACK presents FIVE guffaw-inducing party games in one pack! You’re gonna need more than one party for this. Your phones or tablets are your controllers! For 1-100 players!

Monolith – A top down action shooter with procedurally generated elements. Explore a large, abandoned facility in search of incredible power, fighting dangerous foes and gaining new weapons and upgrades as you progress.

PS2J 202 (June 2018) News Update

Bethesda’s lawsuit against Warner Bros accusing the Westworld mobile game of copying Fallout Shelter has been quietly resolved

Terms weren’t disclosed, but both sides are covering their own legal fees and Bethesda called the resolution “amicable”

My guess? WB found that the company they hired to develop the game copied code and paid to make the problem go away

There’s a sneaky package tracking app that’s crowd-sourcing its data in the worst way possible

The app is called “Parcels – Track Your Packages” (not to be confused with the popular “Parcel” app)

As soon as you download and open it, it starts sending requests to its server looking for packages to track

The weird part here is that you may not have registered any packages yet

What it’s actually doing is downloading the details for shipments that other users have registered, including tracking number and courier details

Then the app uses your device’s resources and connection to get the status of those packages and send the info back, presumably to be forwarded on to the person that’s actually asked for it

This is likely a way to get around any limiting that the tracking websites may have, since the requests are coming from a large number of devices instead of a single group of servers

The problem is that, even if it was done with good intentions, the developers have created a botnet

They could easily leverage this framework to have all the devices perform DDoS attacks or falsify ad-clicks

Besides that, it’s also an issue because there’s no security involved

There’s no encryption on the data that’s being sent or received, or even on the instructions your phone gets from the server

9to5mac had the app running on a test device for an hour and managed to capture tracking info for 52 different shipments because they knew how to look

AT&T has found an easy way to upgrade all their mobile users from 4G to 5G- change the logo!

Background: actual 5G is using a completely new chunk of the wireless spectrum which requires new modem and antenna tech as well as more cell towers due to shorter range (because fun fact, some of the new spectrum is blocked by oxygen)

A much easier strategy, as AT&T has shown, is to just call 4G LTE “5G E”, and roll out software updates to reflect that

As a bonus, some of the phones that got this super-important update are still months behind in security patches

Their justification is that the new name will be applied to areas that have advanced LTE features, and actual 5G will be called 5G+. Because this just isn’t confusing enough

Psyconauts 2 coming out 2019Looks like Raz in actively in the Psyconaut Organization.
Agent Nein is doing experiments on the mind of the villain from the first game.
It looks like Raz’s family may have accepted their powers and be more a part of the story.
An overhead shot of the common enemies you face show a couple new types: a worm thing with yellow eyes, a evil bunny with flame on their back, and a giant Judge with a gavel as a warhammer.
Some teaser shots of game play shows the wonderful ascetic of the game remains intact.

Tidbits

Shout out to fellow APN member I Have Some Notes for the tip

It looks like the fourth film in the Star Trek reboot has been quietly shelved

But hey, at least we got some odd-numbered Star Trek movies that were good!

Vive is introducing new hardware later this year called Vive Pro Eye, that includes eye-tracking from inside the headset

The idea is that you can make menu selections by looking at them instead of having to move your head, and computers can focus resources on rendering the best graphics exactly where you’re looking

Hobbyists have resurrected Kojima’s PT as a free download in Unreal PT

Nearly identical to the PS4 original, just missing the intro and closing cutscene

Also includes a helpful guide.txt for the game’s more obtuse moments

A huge thanks to Dalton, our favourite fan. And thanks to all our Official Fans that support us.And if you want to support us too, its as easy as clicking this link!

Also, make sure to check out RIPT Apparel for sweet 24 tee shirt designs. And don’t forget to use the coupon code PS2JSHOW for 10% off!

We give our first impressions of Fallout 76. The EU is making the internet a difficult place. Josh renews a recommendation, because they’re back. Alan has an awesome human drama that is done best, with zombies.

For more info, Patreon supports get access to our show notes!

A huge thanks to Dalton, our favourite fan. And thanks to all our Official Fans that support us.
And if you want to support us too, its as easy as clicking this link!

Also, make sure to check out RIPT Apparel for sweet 24 tee shirt designs. And don’t forget to use the coupon code PS2JSHOW for 10% off!

Fans answered our question about how the platform you play your games on are linked to the experience. Modders spellchecked code and made a game harder. Josh and Alan both have graphic novel recommendations!

For more info, Patreon supports get access to our show notes!

A huge thanks to Dalton, our favourite fan. And thanks to all our Official Fans that support us.
And if you want to support us too, its as easy as clicking this link!

Also, make sure to check out RIPT Apparel for sweet 24 tee shirt designs. And don’t forget to use the coupon code PS2JSHOW for 10% off!